GDS (Global Distribution System)

The wholesale reservation networks — Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport — through which agencies see availability and issue tickets across hundreds of airlines at once. The GDS is where professional booking actually happens: consolidator contracts load there, married-segment logic runs there, and a skilled agent can see and build itineraries a consumer engine will never display. When we say a construction "prices", the GDS is the machine that said so.